To develop a way to spot check alignment problems. Make sure your shoulders are properly aligned. Your shoulders are the most important element because your swing path will follow the alignment of your shoulders at impact. Subtle compensations can creep into your swing if you are not properly aligned. Without help even the best golfers can have trouble recognizing this. You must constantly check your alignment to be consistent. Poor alignment is a major problem for golfers who slice. Align the clubface squarely then align your body. Check the position of the ball by using alignment clubs also. Most golfers think they play the ball further back than they really do.
To start your practice sessions properly aligned. Don.t assume you are lined up correctly. Remember practice makes permanent, so make sure you are starting off positioned correctly. Learn the square stance first. Later, as the need arises, you can experiment with other stances.
To double check your target line. If you don.t accurately know your target line, you cannot easily tell if you are making swing path errors. Before each shot approach the ball from behind and pick your target line. Then when taking your stance align yourself toward your target. Better players align themselves much more consistently than poor players. Hitting balls without aiming at a target is an invitation for swing problems. Tape, clubs on the ground, or and "practice partners" are all good ways to check alignment. Learn to identify the different between a poor shot and an error in alignment.
Do's and Don'ts
Don't leave the club between your feet longer than needed to check proper ball position. Many good players leave one club on the ground parallel to the target line whenever they hit practice balls. This "drill" is a good way to begin every practice session.
Showing posts with label Golf Drives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Golf Drives. Show all posts
Monday, August 31, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Coil For More Consistency By Matt Holin, Teaching Professional
The primary benefit of having the proper amount of hip bend in your swing is that it allows your body to coil effectively to create an efficient source of power.
While testing the PGA and Champions Tour players' golf swings, we discovered that a proper coil of the body is a simple way of achieving a repeatable power source. Average touring professionals turn their shoulders 41 degrees further on the back swing than their hips. This coiling action allows for a proper weight shift to occur, while maintaining a solid base, by keeping the hip motion in the golf swing to a minimum.
Typically we see most amateurs have two flaws with the coiling action in the golf swing. The first flaw is when a student's hips and shoulders turn together to create a long backswing with no coiling action. This swing usually produces action that takes the club significantly past parallel and is very difficult to repeat from swing to swing. The second flaw is the opposite. A student will not rotate their shoulders at all, leading to a lifting of the club with their arms. This invariably produces a reverse weight shift, which robs power and produces inconsistencies.
Test Your Coil
1. A simple way to test your coil is to set up in proper posture.
2. Now place a golf club in front of your shoulders.
3. Your goal is to turn the club across your shoulders over to your right foot. When you have done that you have created a sufficiently long turn with the shoulders.
4. Now comes the tricky part. Look and see where your belt buckle is facing.
If it is facing inside your right toe, you have a fantastic coil and are ready to hit long consistent golf shots. If your belt buckle is facing right of that point, your hips have rotated too far and you are losing power in you golf swing. By improving your coil you can maximize the efficiency of your swing and improve your ball striking.
While testing the PGA and Champions Tour players' golf swings, we discovered that a proper coil of the body is a simple way of achieving a repeatable power source. Average touring professionals turn their shoulders 41 degrees further on the back swing than their hips. This coiling action allows for a proper weight shift to occur, while maintaining a solid base, by keeping the hip motion in the golf swing to a minimum.
Typically we see most amateurs have two flaws with the coiling action in the golf swing. The first flaw is when a student's hips and shoulders turn together to create a long backswing with no coiling action. This swing usually produces action that takes the club significantly past parallel and is very difficult to repeat from swing to swing. The second flaw is the opposite. A student will not rotate their shoulders at all, leading to a lifting of the club with their arms. This invariably produces a reverse weight shift, which robs power and produces inconsistencies.
Test Your Coil
1. A simple way to test your coil is to set up in proper posture.
2. Now place a golf club in front of your shoulders.
3. Your goal is to turn the club across your shoulders over to your right foot. When you have done that you have created a sufficiently long turn with the shoulders.
4. Now comes the tricky part. Look and see where your belt buckle is facing.
If it is facing inside your right toe, you have a fantastic coil and are ready to hit long consistent golf shots. If your belt buckle is facing right of that point, your hips have rotated too far and you are losing power in you golf swing. By improving your coil you can maximize the efficiency of your swing and improve your ball striking.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Common Swing Faults With Physical Fixes
NOT ALL MUSCLES WERE CREATED THE SAME by Paul Chek
Joint dysfunction Muscle imbalance Static or dynamic postural stability problems All the above are reasons why a player's swing faults are hard to improve long term. Aside from blatant lack of skill, muscle imbalance is by far the most common source of altered neuromechanics and both poor and/or inconsistent swing mechanics. Teaching pros need to be able to identify and correct length-tension relationships. Length-tension relationships (the balance between muscles and groups of muscles) represent and dictate both the real-time function of the working joints and how well the body executes the brain.s swing command.
In the presence of muscle length-tension imbalances, what may be a very good motor engram leaving the brain often manifests as a swing with notable faults. A player with muscle imbalance is most easily identified by his/her poor posture. Altered spinal curvatures disrupt spinal mechanics, leading to compensatory movement at other joints. When the player.s muscle balance and postural alignment are optimal, there is minimal engram (motor command sequence) disruption. In this state, good motor programming results in long term correction of swing faults and minimizes chances of orthopedic injury. One of the main reasons for muscle imbalance is the way our muscles are designed. We have muscles that are classified as TONIC and muscles that are classified as PHASIC.
The physiological reality of how these two muscle types react to both physical and mental stress is what underlies many chronic swing faults that persist despite having spent large sums of money on elite coaching and high-tech clubs! Tonic muscles are ideally suited to postural duties such as holding an address posture and an optimal swing axis. Tonic muscles react to aberrant physical or mental stress by shortening and tightening. Phasic muscles are more suited to dynamic movements such as actually swinging and accelerating the club. Phasic muscles react to aberrant physical or mental stress by lengthening and weakening.
One of the key reasons for the difference responses between the muscle types is the threshold of stimulation; tonic muscles have a low threshold of stimulation, while phasic muscles have a high threshold of stimulation Additionally, as we age (beyond 40) our phasic abdominal and gluteal (butt) muscles tend to weaken, further encouraging muscle imbalance. Experienced golfers often have a very good mental image, or consciousness of the ideal swing, and try with all intent to execute one. Because tonic muscles have a lower threshold of stimulation than phasic muscles and tend to override commands to antagonistic and synergistic phasic muscles, which have a high threshold of stimulation, the physical image or expression of the motor command may not represent the mental image used to generate the movement. Here the tonic lumbar erectors and hip flexors override the phasic abdominal and gluteal musculature, pulling the player into an over-swing; not only does the player frequently not realize he/she is doing this, back pain is a common byproduct. Note that muscle imbalance is most easily identified as poor posture (the key is recognizing what is poor posture versus good posture!).
When a player develops any degree of muscle imbalance, the swing motor engram that leaves the player.s brain is altered in proportion to the degree of facilitation and muscle imbalance that exists in the musculoskeletal system. Additionally, each time a player executes a swing in the presence of muscle imbalance, the engram is progressively altered and the muscle imbalance is further facilitated. This is one reason that golfers play for five or even ten years with minimal improvement in their handicap; even though their understanding of the game is improving, their level of neuromechanical imbalance is of greater influence on their game!
THERE IS A SOLUTION! You can make significant gains toward a better swing by simply stretching the shortened tonic muscles just before you play.
Joint dysfunction Muscle imbalance Static or dynamic postural stability problems All the above are reasons why a player's swing faults are hard to improve long term. Aside from blatant lack of skill, muscle imbalance is by far the most common source of altered neuromechanics and both poor and/or inconsistent swing mechanics. Teaching pros need to be able to identify and correct length-tension relationships. Length-tension relationships (the balance between muscles and groups of muscles) represent and dictate both the real-time function of the working joints and how well the body executes the brain.s swing command.
In the presence of muscle length-tension imbalances, what may be a very good motor engram leaving the brain often manifests as a swing with notable faults. A player with muscle imbalance is most easily identified by his/her poor posture. Altered spinal curvatures disrupt spinal mechanics, leading to compensatory movement at other joints. When the player.s muscle balance and postural alignment are optimal, there is minimal engram (motor command sequence) disruption. In this state, good motor programming results in long term correction of swing faults and minimizes chances of orthopedic injury. One of the main reasons for muscle imbalance is the way our muscles are designed. We have muscles that are classified as TONIC and muscles that are classified as PHASIC.
The physiological reality of how these two muscle types react to both physical and mental stress is what underlies many chronic swing faults that persist despite having spent large sums of money on elite coaching and high-tech clubs! Tonic muscles are ideally suited to postural duties such as holding an address posture and an optimal swing axis. Tonic muscles react to aberrant physical or mental stress by shortening and tightening. Phasic muscles are more suited to dynamic movements such as actually swinging and accelerating the club. Phasic muscles react to aberrant physical or mental stress by lengthening and weakening.
One of the key reasons for the difference responses between the muscle types is the threshold of stimulation; tonic muscles have a low threshold of stimulation, while phasic muscles have a high threshold of stimulation Additionally, as we age (beyond 40) our phasic abdominal and gluteal (butt) muscles tend to weaken, further encouraging muscle imbalance. Experienced golfers often have a very good mental image, or consciousness of the ideal swing, and try with all intent to execute one. Because tonic muscles have a lower threshold of stimulation than phasic muscles and tend to override commands to antagonistic and synergistic phasic muscles, which have a high threshold of stimulation, the physical image or expression of the motor command may not represent the mental image used to generate the movement. Here the tonic lumbar erectors and hip flexors override the phasic abdominal and gluteal musculature, pulling the player into an over-swing; not only does the player frequently not realize he/she is doing this, back pain is a common byproduct. Note that muscle imbalance is most easily identified as poor posture (the key is recognizing what is poor posture versus good posture!).
When a player develops any degree of muscle imbalance, the swing motor engram that leaves the player.s brain is altered in proportion to the degree of facilitation and muscle imbalance that exists in the musculoskeletal system. Additionally, each time a player executes a swing in the presence of muscle imbalance, the engram is progressively altered and the muscle imbalance is further facilitated. This is one reason that golfers play for five or even ten years with minimal improvement in their handicap; even though their understanding of the game is improving, their level of neuromechanical imbalance is of greater influence on their game!
THERE IS A SOLUTION! You can make significant gains toward a better swing by simply stretching the shortened tonic muscles just before you play.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Ben Hogan's Real Golf Secret......It is in the Feet
Ben Hogan did have a secret, but it wasn't in his golf swing....at least not the swing itself. It's not possible to gain Hogan's accuracy from just a single golf tip because Hogan's secret was in the process he used to control his golf swing to become one of the most accurate golfers of all time. This is also the very reason his secret has been an enigma for over 40 years.
Ben Hogan's secret was his extraordinary ability to focus. This was not a gift from heaven. No, Hogan spent long hours perfecting his focus technique. Hogan would take hours to hit just forty balls. He would hit a ball and spend a few minutes to rewind the shot in his mind and go over every aspect of it. Before he hit the next ball he knew everything he did right and wrong with that shot and was ready to hit the next one even better. Hogan fine tuned every swing until it was perfect. He didn't want any bad swings to creep into his system and create any bad habits. His swing is not one to emulate unless you are built like him, but his methods will make any golfer strike the ball well.
If you read very carefully, you can see in Hogan's books just what he did. The problem is that you must understand the swing and his process before you can properly interpret what he wrote. It was only after discovering and perfecting Hogan's system that I re-read his books for probably the tenth time, and realized that he did share his secret, but that he was looking at it from a stand point of someone who already understood. Hogan's swing secret was not just the balance and setup...it's about how he achieved and controlled balance during his swing and how you can get similar results using his control methods. The key phrase is how he controlled his swing movement.
Anyone can make a great swing once in a while, but Hogan was known for doing it almost every time. Hogan said that the game is played keeping the weight on the inside halves of the feet, but that is as far as he went. It's too bad because this statement is the key and the starting point for understanding Hogan's secret of control. His secret? The swing is controlled from the feet. I have taken pros and blindfolded them, leaving them to monitor their swing completely by feel and been able to get them to not only to strike the ball purely, but to shape their shots accurately using only feedback from their feet. Most of the pros on tour use his methods, except they use them subconsciously. Hogan took the process to the conscious level so he could monitor and correct his swing in motion. Today's pros have been convinced that they shouldn't think about anything during the swing, but it has been proven that the mind will not think about nothing. Like it or not, your mind works all of the time, as shown in your dreams. The trick with the golf swing is to focus in such a way so that those thoughts are completely visual, thereby never bothering the brain with any distracting conscious thoughts.
Do you wonder why Tiger no longer uses a guru? It's because he is working on the same process. When he perfects it, and he is close, he'll be unstoppable. Anyone who wants to give Tiger a game in the future will have to know this information or fall by the wayside. How fast does it work? I have shown high handicap golfers the very first balance routine right on the golf course and watched as most of them immediately started hitting their shots more accurately.
Ben Hogan's secret was his extraordinary ability to focus. This was not a gift from heaven. No, Hogan spent long hours perfecting his focus technique. Hogan would take hours to hit just forty balls. He would hit a ball and spend a few minutes to rewind the shot in his mind and go over every aspect of it. Before he hit the next ball he knew everything he did right and wrong with that shot and was ready to hit the next one even better. Hogan fine tuned every swing until it was perfect. He didn't want any bad swings to creep into his system and create any bad habits. His swing is not one to emulate unless you are built like him, but his methods will make any golfer strike the ball well.
If you read very carefully, you can see in Hogan's books just what he did. The problem is that you must understand the swing and his process before you can properly interpret what he wrote. It was only after discovering and perfecting Hogan's system that I re-read his books for probably the tenth time, and realized that he did share his secret, but that he was looking at it from a stand point of someone who already understood. Hogan's swing secret was not just the balance and setup...it's about how he achieved and controlled balance during his swing and how you can get similar results using his control methods. The key phrase is how he controlled his swing movement.
Anyone can make a great swing once in a while, but Hogan was known for doing it almost every time. Hogan said that the game is played keeping the weight on the inside halves of the feet, but that is as far as he went. It's too bad because this statement is the key and the starting point for understanding Hogan's secret of control. His secret? The swing is controlled from the feet. I have taken pros and blindfolded them, leaving them to monitor their swing completely by feel and been able to get them to not only to strike the ball purely, but to shape their shots accurately using only feedback from their feet. Most of the pros on tour use his methods, except they use them subconsciously. Hogan took the process to the conscious level so he could monitor and correct his swing in motion. Today's pros have been convinced that they shouldn't think about anything during the swing, but it has been proven that the mind will not think about nothing. Like it or not, your mind works all of the time, as shown in your dreams. The trick with the golf swing is to focus in such a way so that those thoughts are completely visual, thereby never bothering the brain with any distracting conscious thoughts.
Do you wonder why Tiger no longer uses a guru? It's because he is working on the same process. When he perfects it, and he is close, he'll be unstoppable. Anyone who wants to give Tiger a game in the future will have to know this information or fall by the wayside. How fast does it work? I have shown high handicap golfers the very first balance routine right on the golf course and watched as most of them immediately started hitting their shots more accurately.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Boost your Golf Drives to Lower Scores
Every golfer would like to have a golf training tip to increase their drives by 10, 20, 30 or even 40 yards. But what do you need to focus on to accomplish that?
Have you ever received a golf training tip that didn't work? I think we all have. That can be very frustrating to say the least. But the key to implementing a golf training tip that.s effective is to look at your swing.
Do you lack a full, 90 degree shoulder turn on your backswing? Do you breakdown at impact where it really counts? Or do you have a hard time staying in your golf posture through out your swing? You've got to take a deeper look at your swing faults AND physical limitations to determine what golf training tip will be the most effective in improving your driving distance. Don't just try any golf training tip your golfing buddies tell you. Give it some serious thought before you do one of the golf training tips in the magazines. There are hundreds golf training tips you can read about, but won.t work for you.
Have you ever heard of the .62 point check-list?. If you haven.t, it means instead of having one golf training tip you think about during your swing, you think of 62 of them. Maybe not that many, but you think of enough to accomplish what they term .paralysis by analysis.. When this happens, your swing will go south real quick. This happened to the Number One ranked golfer in the world back in the 90.s. His name? Nick Faldo. He became so mechanically he couldn't even hit a ball. He would enter a tournament and take so many practice swings, and not have one golf training tip on his mind, but many. It took him right out of the world rankings and ultimately off the tour. He is now commentating and doing a great job. Here.s a golf training tip that will help your backswing range of motion, enabling you to have a much higher clubhead speed and quickly improve your driving distance. I call it the Backswing Shoulder Stretch:
Extend left arm out in front of you (if you are a right handed golfer), in a handshake position, thumb pointing skyward.
Take right hand and put under left wrist, so the back of the hands are touching each other.
Pull with right hand against left wrist and make as big a turn on back swing as possible.
Hold for at least 15 seconds, repeat two more times.
Reverse the stretch to work the follow through.
As you can see this is a simple golf training tip, but one that is very effective if you do it consistently. This is a great stretch to do throughout your round to maintain a full backswing. This is just one golf training tip that can have a big impact on your performance; and is well worth trying. About The Author: Mike Pedersen is one of the top golf trainers in the country, author of the Ultimate Golf Fitness Guide, and founder of several cutting-edge online golf fitness sites.
Have you ever received a golf training tip that didn't work? I think we all have. That can be very frustrating to say the least. But the key to implementing a golf training tip that.s effective is to look at your swing.
Do you lack a full, 90 degree shoulder turn on your backswing? Do you breakdown at impact where it really counts? Or do you have a hard time staying in your golf posture through out your swing? You've got to take a deeper look at your swing faults AND physical limitations to determine what golf training tip will be the most effective in improving your driving distance. Don't just try any golf training tip your golfing buddies tell you. Give it some serious thought before you do one of the golf training tips in the magazines. There are hundreds golf training tips you can read about, but won.t work for you.
Have you ever heard of the .62 point check-list?. If you haven.t, it means instead of having one golf training tip you think about during your swing, you think of 62 of them. Maybe not that many, but you think of enough to accomplish what they term .paralysis by analysis.. When this happens, your swing will go south real quick. This happened to the Number One ranked golfer in the world back in the 90.s. His name? Nick Faldo. He became so mechanically he couldn't even hit a ball. He would enter a tournament and take so many practice swings, and not have one golf training tip on his mind, but many. It took him right out of the world rankings and ultimately off the tour. He is now commentating and doing a great job. Here.s a golf training tip that will help your backswing range of motion, enabling you to have a much higher clubhead speed and quickly improve your driving distance. I call it the Backswing Shoulder Stretch:
Extend left arm out in front of you (if you are a right handed golfer), in a handshake position, thumb pointing skyward.
Take right hand and put under left wrist, so the back of the hands are touching each other.
Pull with right hand against left wrist and make as big a turn on back swing as possible.
Hold for at least 15 seconds, repeat two more times.
Reverse the stretch to work the follow through.
As you can see this is a simple golf training tip, but one that is very effective if you do it consistently. This is a great stretch to do throughout your round to maintain a full backswing. This is just one golf training tip that can have a big impact on your performance; and is well worth trying. About The Author: Mike Pedersen is one of the top golf trainers in the country, author of the Ultimate Golf Fitness Guide, and founder of several cutting-edge online golf fitness sites.
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